Ralph Sneeden’s debut poetry collection, Evidence of the Journey, was published by Harmon Blunt in 2007. The title poem received the Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry magazine in 2004 and his poems have also appeared in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Slate, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly, among others. He currently lives in New Hampshire and teaches at the Phillips Exeter Academy.
How long did it take you to complete your first collection of poems, Evidence of the Journey?
One of my favorite books in The Odyssey is when Menelaos tells the story of his run-in with Proteus on the beach, the minor sea god who, to avoid capture, changes shape. First he’s a lion, then a serpent, a leopard, a boar, water, a tree. The first manifestation of any book-length MS about which I felt confident (for sending out)… was probably around 1995. It has changed its shape a lot since then, and I’m certain it’s a better book. The original title, until the fall of 2006, was Off Little Misery Island, which I actually miss more than I though I would. That title had an edge, tonal ambiguity, and the suggestion of the book’s principle setting (the coast). The MS was a finalist for the Yale Younger Poets, the Whitman (twice), Sarabande (I lost count), U. Wisconsin-Brittingham/Pollack (twice), Kent State, etc. etc. Even so, it was simply too confining for the scope and voice in the existing book (see answer to next question). My good friend Todd Hearon is heroic when it comes to putting old work behind. His first book MS is still in a drawer. When it wasn’t published and his work kept changing and a new book began to grow, he simply focused on the new book. My curse is that I kept working on the same book; if the door was still open, it wasn’t done. The temptation to keep shaping that first book is fierce, nagging. I simply continued yanking the older stuff out, and weaving the new work in. Which means that if earlier poems made it through all those years of cutting, they were probably meant to stay. Over time, many begin to lose their radiance, especially when your voice starts to change (but then you ask yourself, “What will this do to the acknowledgements page?”). There were a few I just couldn’t shake (I wrote a short piece for the NH Poet Laureate site that explains this better: NH Arts - Poet Laureate). The short answer to the question: there were probably about four possible books before Evidence of the Journey was apprehended in its current state. If it hadn’t been taken last year, it would still be changing. A goat, a dolphin, an amplifier…
What made you decide to go with Harmon Blunt as a publisher? What has your experience been like with them?
Originally, Off Little Misery Island had been taken by a new publisher in Berkeley CA, around the fall of 2004. It was to have been a letterpress edition, 2,000 copies in soft and hard cover. I had been contacted through Poetry magazine by the person who was starting the press, who had been following my work in the magazine. She was also going to print a few books of translations by a prominent, more established American poet. It seemed like quite an honor, a promising and unique offer, especially after I signed the contract and was paid an advance. A few years went by, however, and though the design of the book was elegant, obstacles and delays kept the project limping along indefinitely. It was so close--I’d seen the proofs, a gorgeous little prospectus had been printed up, and yet… By the end of the summer of 2006, I thought for sure that the book would be done, but it wasn’t, and there was no end in sight. I really wanted to move on, and I had, artistically, writing more new poems since I had signed the contract than at any point in my career. I was also working on a novel-in-stories. The time allowed by a semester sabbatical opened the door to a new book MS and I was off and running. It was incredibly liberating, but Off Little Misery Island still wasn’t out, and the third year since its acceptance was beginning, and friends were telling me I was far too laid back about the deal with the publisher, and that I should pull it. Time was whizzing by. So, I did. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Back to square one. Depressing as it was, I returned to what I thought was set in stone and began messing around with it again, cranking up the submission machine, stuffing envelopes, writing checks. Uuugh. Then a good friend in NYC called to tell me he was starting a new press with his brother. Nathaniel Bellows knew my work better than anyone, had been reading it before there was anything close to Off Little Misery Island. He was also more familiar than anybody (except for my family) with my trials, close calls, delays, etc. There are few people for whose work I have more respect. And there are few people who get things done more efficiently and tastefully. Writer, visual artist, brutal editor, and very savvy with computers and design, Nathaniel asked me if he could have the book, and I said yes. It was done in six months. We agreed that the MS had changed, deepened, and that the more recent poems demanded a more expansive, more mysterious title. So, the book’s closing poem became the book’s title poem. Evidence of the Journey seemed appropriate, not only because it put some distance between me and the disaster, but because it was also the perfect description of the book’s twisted and grueling little odyssey. Harmon Blunt rules. And after being unlucky for so many years, I felt like the luckiest man alive. Quite an honor to be in on the ground floor of an operation like that.
You’ve taught in the English Department at the Philips Exeter Academy for a number of years. In what ways does your teaching inform your creative life (if at all)?
I get paid to read books very carefully, then help small groups of students gain a better understanding of them together in discussion. Other than having all the free time in the world (unrealistic), what other circumstance could be more generative for a writer? I can choose any books I want, so I’m always challenging myself to read what I haven’t, or what I’ve always wanted to. From Shakespeare to Hardy to contemporary American poetry. I’m also on the Lamont Committee, which helps to bring two prominent poets to the school every year. Very inspiring. After each visit, I’m always jacked up with creative electricity. Exeter is also incredibly supportive and generous with funding for writing retreats, residencies. Living/working at a boarding school has changed the way I write, as far as my schedule goes. When I came here in ’95 I was in good shape, just out of my MFA program, a lot of momentum, but most importantly I had discipline, which was something new for me: getting up every day between 4:30 and 5 AM and writing for two or three hours. Working at a day school before Exeter (while working on an MFA) and having two small children taught me to claim those early morning hours. Things have changed. When I came to Exeter I had to live in a dorm, and eventually become a dorm head. So, the early morning regimen went right out the window. I couldn’t go to sleep early, either because of duty or some crisis in the dorm. Weirdly, the moments of high inspiration and aesthetic demands came when I had the least time. Piles of papers to grade, exhausted, high-maintenance advisees, English department responsibilities…that’s when the ideas for poems or stories would come. Somehow, I worked it out over the past thirteen years. But we moved out of the dorm this year into a house, so I’m still trying to find my creative bearings in this new situation, without the psychic energy/burden of the dorm, its interruptions, responsibilities, and pace. I’ll figure it out.
What was your favorite book and band in high school?
I didn’t read in high school. Somehow, I got through it all without even touching a novel or a play. The education Ed. D’s have a name for it, maybe a “vertical curriculum” or something like that. Well, whatever it was, I was lost in it. My English classes were Rhetoric, Journalism, The Elements of Style. Any literature came from my Latin teacher, who had us reading all sorts of great stuff. So, I goofed around with books outside of school because my parents demanded that I read something. I read crap, mostly. I think they were very disappointed in my ambition as a reader. Instead of the classics, it was old pulp Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, Leon Uris, bad science fiction, fantasy. Though, The Lord of the Rings trilogy is something I remember fondly, and aesthetically. I was more interested in doing things, like being out in my boat (don’t get the wrong idea, it was a small aluminum rowboat with a small engine), canoeing, hiking, scuba diving (I was obsessed with Jacques Cousteau. Who wasn’t, back then?), fishing, skateboarding, camping, skiing, trying to surf. I liked being outside, in the water. It wasn’t until halfway through my undergraduate career that something exploded (maybe I started to grow up) when I discovered Kafka, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Nabokov. My musical taste in high school was a little different, though paradoxical, maybe reflecting something about how confused and naïve I was about art. In ninth and tenth grade I was listening to Aerosmith; Alice Cooper; Uriah Heep (now there’s a band you don’t hear about any more), Yes; Deep Purple; Emerson, Lake and Palmer, etc. By the junior and senior years I was listening to Elvis Costello, The Talking Heads, etc, but my favorite bands and musicians were Stevie Wonder; Earth, Wind, and Fire; and most importantly Weather Report (the album: Heavy Weather), which was where I started my journey to understanding the music I love best: jazz. My parents’ swing music was always playing in the house, and I liked it very much, but the album that is monolithic before, during, and after high school, and has an effect on me still (both aesthetically and nostalgically) is Getz/Gilberto.
Which crowd did you hang out with in high school?
Impossible to answer. It was a big regional public high school. Yes, there were people called “jocks” and “freaks” and “thespians,” etc. , but I played hockey, loved art class and graphic arts, and many of my friends fell into any of those categories. So it’s hard to say. I played hockey twelve months out of the year, but later in high school I began to lose interest, and I think falling out of this group was not a bad thing, it widened my circle of friends. It was less about sports, more about “who wants to go hiking in Maine?”
Favorite book of the moment?
David Copperfield.
What are you working on these days?
Not much. Moving into a new house, knowing that my son is on the other side of the world (Samoa) but not knowing if he’s ok, behind in my school work (papers, colleague evaluations) because I coached soccer this fall . . . all of this adds up to creative disorientation. I have a few new poems up and running, one about two short films of my father (in the 1948 Olympics in London and the Liberation of Stalag Luft One in Germany). I’m also trying to write a poem about a memory I have of being on the phone with a girl for the first time while trying to read the new issue of Spiderman. New work coming out in The New Republic and Down East Magazine. It’s always heartening to have something on the horizon, at any stage, either forthcoming in a magazine or a wonderful annoyance/germ that distracts and grows in your mind, journal, or on the laptop screen.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten? The worst?
The worst was what my first undergraduate writing teacher said to us the first day of the seminar, “Do you want to be a writer, or do you want to be happy?” Half the class didn’t return the next time we were supposed to meet. He was good for me in many ways, a real hard-ass. But this advice did not turn out to be true. Or, more likely, it means means that I’m not a real writer. The best? Other than, “Don’t make excuses” (my wife’s advice), I’m still looking for it.
What are some of your guilty pleasures?
Surfing during the week. Because I teach at a boarding school, the days and weeks are long. We have classes six days a week, and when you’re in a dorm, you can be up past midnight “working,” which means there are chunks of time during the day when you can exercise, clear your head, take a nap, do whatever you need to re-charge your battery. We’re only ten-fifteen minutes from the coast and some excellent surf breaks, which is incredibly convenient. If I have two hours free, and I feel that I’m caught up with paperwork, I can zip over there (when there’s a swell), surf for an hour, and be back on campus, showered, sinuses draining as I walk into my classroom. It is a luxury, and one that gives me perspective; I don’t think about anything else when I’m in the water, and when I get back to campus, I’m in an improved psychic/emotional/spiritual state. Ready to work. Even so, maybe it’s the residue of a catholic childhood, perhaps I was a Puritan in another life, but I do feel a little guilty driving through town with my board on the roof at noon on a Tuesday. But it doesn’t last long.
Favorite recipe? (the more specificity the better, so someone could make it if they wanted)
A whole chicken slathered in olive oil, rosemary, garlic, and salt, cooked for three hours (not directly over the coals, after they’ve died down a bit) in a Weber grill, vents barely open.
What's on your desk at the moment?
A guitar pick, a hi-lighter, an old opened locket I took from my Aunt’s house when she died (faded portraits of my dad and his father -- the former in a Boy Scout uniform, the latter in formal NYFD uniform), noise-canceling headphones, three coffee cups, four thick folders of ungraded student papers.
Stones or Beatles?
Beatles. I don’t hate the Stones now (though I did as a kid), but there’s so much more going on with the Beatles (at their best). I remember sitting hunched, frozen in front of Donald Newton’s 8-track player in Southampton Shores, LI, when Abbey Road came out. I do not recall having an aesthetic experience with the Stones, other than that great scene from Apocalypse Now from which I can’t separate Satisfaction, though the smell of stale beer returns, wafting from the industrial gray dorm carpet and the image of that Asian guy named Ed with long black hair dragging his snout across the top of the giant speaker cabinet in our common room, snorfling lines of who knows what…
Hemingway or Fitzgerald?
Is there any question? What Hemingway wrote about and how he wrote about it are so much more interesting. I connected with his work immediately as an undergraduate. I’ll never forget the moment I read the scene in The Sun Also Rises when Jake swims out to the raft at a beach (San Sebastian…green water?) in Spain. I was momentarily transformed, especially juxtaposed to the alcohol-soaked pages that precede and follow it. I remember feeling a jolt of familiarity, of saying to myself, “That’s me!” Or the trout fishing scene on the Ebro in that same novel. I like Fitzgerald, so do my students, but the prose is a little much at times. Unnecessarily dense, a little pretentious, labored. And dated, for me. Which, ironically, is something I can’t say about Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy. I just don’t care about Fitzgeralds’s characters. When the stories are over, I can’t say that I miss having these people in my life. That’s not to say Hemingway’s characters don’t have faults (as constructions . . . or that his prose doesn’t have its moments of “?”), but the complexities of his novels and stories are simultaneously subtle and heartbreaking, the narratives, dialogue, and details (at their best) are vibrating with something underneath, something more compelling than Fitzgerald’s. Hemingway is not my favorite writer, but compared to Fitzgerald? No hesitation.
Porn name (first pet's name + first street you lived on)?
“Missy Alhama” (Beagle who was put to sleep because she bit me in 1965 as I carried dirty dishes from the grill back to the kitchen, and our street in Woodland Hills, CA, 1960).
November 28, 2007
Quickie Interview # 28: Ralph Sneeden
November 26, 2007
"Barfly" has been added to your Queue.
Growing up, like in high school I guess, I came to be a really big fan of the poetry of Charles Bukowski and the prose of Jack Kerouac. In spite of feeling sort of alienated/excluded by their writing as a result of my being a female person, I found both of them to be compelling as writers, and fascinating as real/larger-than-life figures.
By the end of college, I’d started to get the impression—from the subtle but unmistakable cues of favorite professors, and from the outright sneering dismissals of my ostensibly better-read peers—that admitting to an affinity for Bukowski and/or Kerouac could be seen as immature if not embarrassing. Same deal in grad school. As a result, I made myself push my early affection for those writers into my past, a feeling to be remembered with nostalgia, maybe, but also with an eye-rolling, can-you-believe-how-naïve-I-was attitude.
This year, though, both JK and the Buk are up for Serious Critical Reassessment, owing to it being the 50th anniversary of the former’s On the Road and the year of the release of the latter’s Selected Poems. With this spate of reexamination, I’m starting to think that maybe liking Bukowski and Kerouac isn’t a shameful sign of underdeveloped taste. And that maybe some people only think this is the case because so many fans are really obnoxious/ignorant in their fandom? Or as Jim Harrison put it in Sunday’s NYTBR: “Our perceptions of Bukowski, like our perceptions of Kerouac, are muddied by the fact that many of his most ardent fans are nitwits who love him to the exclusion of any of his contemporaries.” So yeah, I love Charles Bukowski and I love Jack Kerouac. There. I said it. Wanna make something of it?
November 22, 2007
A poem for the holiday...Happy Thanksgiving!!!
HOMAGE TO MISTRESS BRADSTREET
by John Berryman
[1]
The Governor your husband lived so long
moved you not, restless, waiting for him? Still,
you were a patient woman.—
I seem to see you pause here still:
Sylvester, Quarles, in moments odd you pored
before a fire at, bright eyes on the Lord,
all the children still.
‘Simon ...’ Simon will listen while you read a Song.
[2]
Outside the New World winters in grand dark
white air lashing high thro’ the virgin stands
foxes down foxholes sigh,
surely the English heart quails, stunned.
I doubt if Simon than this blast, that sea,
spares from his rigour for your poetry
more. We are on each other’s hands
who care. Both of our worlds unhanded us. Lie stark,
[3]
thy eyes look to me mild. Out of maize & air
your body’s made, and moves. I summon, see,
from the centuries it.
I think you won’t stay. How do we
linger, diminished, in our lovers’ air,
implausibly visible, to whom, a year,
years, over interims; or not;
to a long stranger; or not; shimmer & disappear.
[4]
Jaw-ript, rot with its wisdom, rending then;
then not. When the mouth dies, who misses you?
Your master never died,
Simon ah thirty years past you—
Pockmarkt & westward staring on a haggard deck
it seems I find you, young. I come to check,
I come to stay with you,
and the Governor, & Father, & Simon, & the huddled men.
[5]
By the week we landed we were, most, used up.
Strange ships across us, after a fortnight’s winds
unfavouring, frightened us;
bone-sad cold, sleet, scurvy; so were ill
many as one day we could have no sermons;
broils, quelled; a fatherless child unkennelled; vermin
crowding & waiting: waiting.
And the day itself he leapt ashore young Henry Winthrop
[6]
(delivered from the waves; because he found
off their wigwams, sharp-eyed, a lone canoe
across a tidal river,
that water glittered fair & blue
& narrow, none of the other men could swim
and the plantation’s prime theft up to him,
shouldered on a glad day
hard on the glorious feasting of thanksgiving) drowned.
[7]
How long with nothing in the ruinous heat,
clams & acorns stomaching, distinction perishing,
at which my heart rose,
with brackish water, we would sing.
When whispers knew the Governor’s last bread
was browning in his oven, we were discourag’d.
The Lady Arbella dying—
dyings—at which my heart rose, but I did submit.
[8]
That beyond the Atlantic wound our woes enlarge
is hard, hard that starvation burnishes our fear,
but I do gloss for You.
Strangers & pilgrims fare we here,
declaring we seek a City. Shall we be deceived?
I know whom I have trusted, & whom I have believed,
and that he is able to
keep that I have committed to his charge.
[9]
Winter than summer worse, that first, like a file
on a quick, or the poison suck of a thrilled tooth;
and still we may unpack.
Wolves & storms among, uncouth
board-pieces, boxes, barrels vanish, grow
houses, rise. Motes that hop in sunlight slow
indoors, and I am Ruth
away: open my mouth, my eyes wet: I wóuld smile:
[10]
vellum I palm, and dream. Their forest dies
to greensward, privets, elms & towers, whence
a nightingale is throbbing.
Women sleep sound. I was happy once . .
(Something keeps on not happening; I shrink?)
These minutes all their passions & powers sink
and I am not one chance
for an unknown cry or a flicker of unknown eyes.
[11]
Chapped souls ours, by the day Spring’s strong winds swelled,
Jack’s pulpits arched, more glad. The shawl I pinned
flaps like a shooting soul
might in such weather Heaven send.
Succumbing half, in spirit, to a salmon sash
I prod the nerveless novel succotash—
I must be disciplined,
in arms, against that one, and our dissidents, and myself.
[12]
Versing, I shroud among the dynasties;
quaternion on quaternion, tireless I phrase
anything past, dead, far,
sacred, for a barbarous place.
—To please your wintry father? all this bald
abstract didactic rime I read appalled
harassed for your fame
mistress neither of fiery nor velvet verse, on your knees
[13]
hopeful & shamefast, chaste, laborious, odd,
whom the sea tore. —The damned roar with loss,
so they hug & are mean
with themselves, and I cannot be thus.
Why then do I repine, sick, bad, to long
after what must not be? I lie wrong
once more. For at fourteen
I found my heart more carnal and sitting loose from God,
[14]
vanity & the follies of youth took hold of me;
then the pox blasted, when the Lord returned.
That year for my sorry face
so-much-older Simon burned,
so Father smiled, with love. Their will be done.
He to me ill lingeringly, learning to shun
a bliss, a lightning blood
vouchsafed, what did seem life. I kissed his Mystery.
[15]
Drydust in God’s eye the aquavivid skin
of Simon snoring lit with fountaining dawn
when my eyes unlid, sad.
John Cotton shines on Boston’s sin—
I ám drawn, in pieties that seem
the weary drizzle of an unremembered dream.
Women have gone mad
at twenty-one. Ambition mines, atrocious, in.
[16]
Food endless, people few, all to be done.
As pippins roast, the question of the wolves
turns & turns.
Fangs of a wolf will keep, the neck
round of a child, that child brave. I remember who
in meeting smiled & was punisht, and I know who
whispered & was stockt.
We lead a thoughtful life. But Boston’s cage we shun.
[17]
The winters close, Springs open, no child stirs
under my withering heart, O seasoned heart
God grudged his aid.
All things else soil like a shirt.
Simon is much away. My executive stales.
The town came through for the cartway by the pales,
but my patience is short.
I revolt from, I am like, these savage foresters
[18]
whose passionless dicker in the shade, whose glance
impassive & scant, belie their murderous cries
when quarry seems to show.
Again I must have been wrong, twice.
Unwell in a new way. Can that begin?
God brandishes. O love, O I love. Kin,
gather. My world is strange
and merciful, ingrown months, blessing a swelling trance.
[19]
So squeezed, wince you I scream? I love you & hate
off with you. Ages! Useless. Below my waist
he has me in Hell’s vise.
Stalling. He let go. Come back: brace
me somewhere. No. No. Yes! everything down
hardens I press with horrible joy down
my back cracks like a wrist
shame I am voiding oh behind it is too late
[20]
hide me forever I work thrust I must free
now I all muscles & bones concentrate
what is living from dying?
Simon I must leave you so untidy
Monster you are killing me Be sure
I’ll have you later Women do endure
I can can no longer
and it passes the wretched trap whelming and I am me
[21]
drencht & powerful, I did it with my body!
One proud tug greens heaven. Marvellous,
unforbidding Majesty.
Swell, imperious bells. I fly.
Mountainous, woman not breaks and will bend:
sways God nearby: anguish comes to an end.
Blossomed Sarah, and I
blossom. Is that thing alive? I hear a famisht howl.
[22]
Beloved household, I am Simon’s wife,
and the mother of Samuel—whom greedy yet I miss
out of his kicking place.
More in some ways I feel at a loss,
freer. Cantabanks & mummers, nears
longing for you. Our chopping scores my ears,
our costume bores my eyes.
St. George to the good sword, rise! chop-logic’s rife
[23]
& fever & Satan & Satan’s ancient fere.
Pioneering is not feeling well,
not Indians, beasts.
Not all their riddling can forestall
one leaving. Sam, your uncle has had to
go fróm us to live with God. ‘Then Aunt went too?’
Dear, she does wait still.
Stricken: ‘Oh. Then he takes us one by one.’ My dear.
[24]
Forswearing it otherwise, they starch their minds.
Folkmoots, & blether, blether. John Cotton rakes
to the synod of Cambridge.
Down from my body my legs flow,
out from it arms wave, on it my head shakes.
Now Mistress Hutchinson rings forth a call—
should she? many creep out at a broken wall—
affirming the Holy Ghost
dwells in one justified. Factioning passion blinds
[25]
all to all her good, all can she be exiled?
Bitter sister, victim! I miss you.
—I miss you, Anne,
day or night weak as a child,
tender & empty, doomed, quick to no tryst.
—I hear you. Be kind, you who leaguer
my image in the mist.
—Be kind you, to one unchained eager far & wild
[26]
and if, 0 my love, my heart is breaking, please
neglect my cries and I will spare you. Deep
in Time’s grave, Love’s, you lie still.
Lie still. —Now? That happy shape
my forehead had under my most long, rare,
ravendark, hidden, soft bodiless hair
you award me still.
You must not love me, but I do not bid you cease.
[27]
Veiled my eyes, attending. How can it be I?
Moist, with parted lips, I listen, wicked.
I shake in the morning & retch.
Brood I do on myself naked.
A fading world I dust, with fingers new.
—I have earned the right to be alone with you.
—What right can that be?
Convulsing, if you love, enough, like a sweet lie.
[28]
Not that, I know, you can. This cratered skin,
like the crabs & shells of my Palissy ewer, touch!
Oh, you do, you do?
Falls on me what I like a witch,
for lawless holds, annihilations of law
which Time and he and man abhor, foresaw:
sharper than what my Friend
brought me for my revolt when I moved smooth & thin,
[29]
faintings black, rigour, chilling, brown
parching, back, brain burning, the grey pocks
itch, a manic stench
of pustules snapping, pain floods the palm,
sleepless, or a red shaft with a dreadful start
rides at the chapel, like a slipping heart.
My soul strains in one qualm
ah but this is not to save me but to throw me down.
[30]
And out of this I lull. It lessens. Kiss me.
That once. As sings out up in sparkling dark
a trail of a star & dies,
while the breath flutters, sounding, mark,
so shorn ought such caresses to us be
who, deserving nothing, flush and flee
the darkness of that light,
a lurching frozen from a warm dream. Talk to me.
[31]
—It is Spring’s New England. Pussy willows wedge
up in the wet. Milky crestings, fringed
yellow, in heaven, eyed
by the melting hand-in-hand or mere
desirers single, heavy-footed, rapt,
make surge poor human hearts. Venus is trapt—
the hefty pike shifts, sheer—
in Orion blazing. Warblings, odours, nudge to an edge—
[32]
—Ravishing, ha, what crouches outside ought,
flamboyant, ill, angelic. Often, now,
I am afraid of you.
I am a sobersides; I know.
I want to take you for my lover. —Do.
—I hear a madness. Harmless I to you
am not, not I? —No.
—I cannot but be. Sing a concord of our thought.
[33]
—Wan dolls in indigo on gold: refrain
my western lust. I am drowning in this past.
I lose sight of you
who mistress me from air. Unbraced
in delirium of the grand depths, giving away
haunters what kept me, I breathe solid spray.
—I am losing you!
Straiten me on. —I suffered living like a stain:
[34]
I trundle the bodies, on the iron bars,
over that fire backward & forth; they burn;
bits fall. I wonder if
I killed them. Women serve my turn.
—Dreams! You are good. —No. —Dense with hardihood
the wicked are dislodged, and lodged the good.
In green space we are safe.
God awaits us (but I am yielding) who Hell wars.
[35]
—I cannot feel myself God waits. He flies
nearer a kindly world; or he is flown.
One Saturday’s rescue
won’t show. Man is entirely alone
may be. I am a man of griefs & fits
trying to be my friend. And the brown smock splits,
down the pale flesh a gash
broadens and Time holds up your heart against my eyes.
[36]
—Hard and divided heaven! creases me. Shame
is failing. My breath is scented, and I throw
hostile glances towards God.
Crumpling plunge of a pestle, bray:
sin cross & opposite, wherein I survive
nightmares of Eden. Reaches foul & live
he for me, this soul
to crunch, a minute tangle of eternal flame.
[37]
I fear Hell’s hammer-wind. But fear does wane.
Death’s blossoms grain my hair; I cannot live.
A black joy clashes
joy, in twilight. The Devil said
‘I will deal toward her softly, and her enchanting cries
will fool the horns of Adam.’ Father of lies,
a male great pestle smashes
small women swarming towards the mortar’s rim in vain.
[38]
I see the cruel spread Wings black with saints!
Silky my breasts not his, mine, mine, to withhold
or tender, tender.
I am sifting, nervous, and bold.
The light is changing. Surrender this loveliness
you cannot make me do. But I will. Yes.
What horror, down stormy air,
warps towards me? My threatening promise faints—
[39]
torture me, Father, lest not I be thine!
Tribunal terrible & pure, my God,
mercy for him and me.
Faces half-fanged, Christ drives abroad,
and though the crop hopes, Jane is so slipshod
I cry. Evil dissolves, & love, like foam;
that love. Prattle of children powers me home,
my heart claps like the swan’s
under a frenzy of who love me & who shine.
[40]
As a canoe slides by on one strong stroke
hope his hélp not I, who do hardly bear
his gift still. But whisper
I am not utterly. I pare
an apple for my pipsqueak Mercy and
she runs & all need naked apples, fanned
their tinier envies.
Vomitings, trots, rashes. Can be hope a cloak?
[41]
for the man with cropt ears glares. My fingers tighten
my skirt. I pass. Alas! I pity all.
Shy, shy, with mé, Dorothy.
Moonrise, and frightening hoots. ‘Mother,
how long will I be dead?’ Our friend the owl
vanishes, darling, but your homing soul
retires on Heaven, Mercy:
not we one instant die, only our dark does lighten.
[42]
When by me in the dusk my child sits down
I am myself. Simon, if it’s that loose,
let me wiggle it out.
You’ll get a bigger one there, & bite.
How they loft, how their sizes delight and grate.
The proportioned, spiritless poems accumulate.
And they publish them
away in brutish London, for a hollow crown.
[43]
Father is not himself. He keeps his bed,
and threw a saffron scum Thursday. God-forsaken words
escaped him raving. Save,
Lord, thy servant zealous & just.
Sam he saw back from Harvard. He did scold
his secting enemies. His stomach is cold
while we drip, while
my baby John breaks out. O far from where he bred!
[44]
Bone of moaning: sung Where he has gone
a thousand summers by truth-hallowed souls;
be still. Agh, he is gone!
Where? I know. Beyond the shoal.
Still-all a Christian daughter grinds her teeth
a little. This our land has ghosted with
our dead: I am at home.
Finish, Lord, in me this work thou hast begun.
[45]
And they tower, whom the pear-tree lured
to let them fall, fierce mornings they reclined
down the brook-bank to the east
fishing for shiners with a crookt pin,
wading, dams massing, well, and Sam’s to be
a doctor in Boston. After the divisive sea,
and death’s first feast,
and the galled effort on the wilderness endured,
[46]
Arminians, and the King bore against us;
of an ‘inward light’ we hear with horror.
Whose fan is in his hand
and he will throughly purge his floor,
come towards mé. I have what licks the joints
and bites the heart, which winter more appoints.
Iller I, oftener.
Hard at the outset; in the ending thus hard, thus?
[47]
Sacred & unutterable Mind
flashing thorough the universe one thought,
I do wait without peace.
In the article of death I budge.
Eat my sore breath, Black Angel. Let me die.
Body a-drain, when will you be dry
and countenance my speed
to Heaven’s springs? lest stricter writhings have me declined.
[48]
‘What are those pictures in the air at night,
Mother?’ Mercy did ask. Space charged with faces
day & night! I place
a goatskin’s fetor, and sweat: fold me
in savoury arms. Something is shaking, wrong.
He smells the musket and lifts it. It is long.
It points at my heart.
Missed he must have. In the gross storm of sunlight
[49]
I sniff a fire burning without outlet,
consuming acrid its own smoke. It’s me.
Ruined laughter sounds
outside. Ah but I waken, free.
And so I am about again. I hagged
a fury at the short maid, whom tongues tagged,
and I am sorry. Once
less I was anxious when more passioned to upset
[50]
the mansion & the garden & the beauty of God.
Insectile unreflective busyness
blunts & does amend.
Hangnails, piles, fibs, life’s also.
But we are that from which draws back a thumb.
The seasons stream and, somehow, I am become
an old woman. It’s so:
I look. I bear to look. Strokes once more his rod.
[51]
My window gives on the graves, in our great new house
(how many burned?) upstairs, among the elms.
I lie, & endure, & wonder.
A haze slips sometimes over my dreams
and holiness on horses’ bells shall stand.
Wandering pacemaker, unsteadying friend,
in a redskin calm I wait:
beat when you will our end. Sinkings & droopings drowse.
[52]
They say thro’ the fading winter Dorothy fails,
my second, who than I bore one more, nine;
and I see her inearthed. I linger.
Seaborn she wed knelt before Simon;
Simon I, and linger. Black-yellow seething, vast
it lies fróm me, mine: all they look aghast.
It will be a glorious arm.
Docile I watch. My wreckt chest hurts when Simon pales.
[53]
In the yellowing days your faces wholly fail,
at Fall’s onset. Solemn voices fade.
I feel no coverlet.
Light notes leap, a beckon, swaying
the tilted, sickening ear within. I’ll—I’ll—
I am closed & coming. Somewhere! I defile
wide as a cloud, in a cloud,
unfit, desirous, glad—even the singings veil—
[54]
—You are not ready? You áre ready. Pass,
as shadow gathers shadow in the welling night.
Fireflies of childhood torch
you down. We commit our sister down.
One candle mourn by, which a lover gave,
the use’s edge and order of her grave.
Quiet? Moisture shoots.
Hungry throngs collect. They sword into the carcass.
[55]
Headstones stagger under great draughts of time
after heads pass out, and their world must reel
speechless, blind in the end
about its chilling star: thrift tuft,
whin cushion—nothing. Already with the wounded flying
dark air fills, I am a closet of secrets dying,
races murder, foxholes hold men,
reactor piles wage slow upon the wet brain rime.
[56]
I must pretend to leave you. Only you draw off
a benevolent phantom. I say you seem to me
drowned towns off England,
featureless as those myriads
who what bequeathed save fire-ash, fossils, burled
in the open river-drifts of the Old World?
Simon lived on for years.
I renounce not even ragged glances, small teeth, nothing,
[57]
O all your ages at the mercy of my loves
together lie at once, forever or
so long as I happen.
In the rain of pain & departure, still
Love has no body and presides the sun,
and elf’s from silence melody. I run.
Hover, utter, still,
a sourcing whom my lost candle like the firefly loves.
November 21, 2007
Blood in the water
Yes, Mailer is dead. I’d honestly like to know if there’s anyone out there who’s read it all. (I haven’t. I read The Armies of Night, The Executioner’s Song, Cannibals and Christians, and what I could stand of Ancient Evenings.) Frankly, there was a lot of it, and if his oeuvre ever happened to topple over and trap you beneath it, you would be trapped there a long time. My dad once observed that you could tell you were reading a book by someone who had been married six times and was carrying a lot of alimony, because why would you use one sentence when you could use five? (Ancient Evenings was a particular offender in this regard. I appreciate Egyptian symbology as much as the next person, but the man wrote the textual equivalent of more jump cuts than MTV uses. Tom Robbins has a species of the same affliction. Rather than come up with a vivd metaphor and weight its effects, and modulate the intensity of your prose, both Robbins and Mailer will/would bully you with seven metaphors.) Which is not to say that Mailer (or Robbins) is without talent. I still think Armies of Night is a great book, and lord knows Creative Nonfiction would not be the same without his star in the firmament. But the one thing that I took away from the essays in Cannibals and Christians (other than the staggering amount of self-indulgence it takes to interview oneself) is that he was a man who was deeply, profoundly worried about whether or not other writers were better/more famous/got laid more than him. And unlike the rest of us who try to strangle such serpents in their crib, Mailer felt free to slag his contemporaries whenever possible and in whatever venue, on what I must assume is the theory that anyone who read them was someone who wasn’t reading him. I found this zero-sum outlook quite unattractive. I’m sure that it made him legions of enemies, and for someone who made a career out of dismissing the importance of others (like Bukowski, he seemed always ready to point out how difficult it was for him to write and why no one else should attempt it), I can’t say I’m surprised that everyone has their spray-can out, ready to deface the memorial he consciously built for himself. I never read someone else who so casually and transparently tried to hamstring his closest competitors. And, as always, the threat of physical violence (ala William Buckley’s clenched jaw mutterings) was never far away. This is not to say that Mailer deserves venomous eulogies, just that they haven’t materialized out of the blue. My complaint is that the obits that I have read really haven’t talked about him as an innovator of creative non-fiction, but instead focused on his PR machine.
November 19, 2007
Auf Wiedersehen, bitches!
The new season of Project Runway started last week. I know a lot of poets who watch this show (Silliman spent some time blogging it last year); it's the only reality show and maybe the only show period that I like. What's the appeal? Maybe it's that, as Santino Rice says, "Fashion is art; art is fashion." Maybe I feel some kinship with practitioners of a high art that goes misunderstood and underappreciated by the public at large, seen as frivolous and irrelevant. America gets its poetry in the BAP and its fashion at the Gap.
Speaking of being in or out, is anybody else naively scandalized by the scathing obits Norman Mailer is accruing? I guess I thought the whole point of an obituary was to remember someone fondly/respectfully. "Pugnacious" or no, I somehow didn't expect thinly disguised potshots like "transparently ambitious" from The New York Times: "If he never quite succeeded in bringing off what he called 'the big one' — the Great American Novel — it was not for want of trying." Thanks, NYT, love you too.
November 14, 2007
NBA Winners Named
The results for the National Book Awards are in and Denis Johnson took it home for Tree of Smoke and Robert Hass for Time and Materials. Though I'd only read two of the fiction finalists, I was pulling for Jim Shepard, though I've heard Tree of Smoke is incredible, so I’m not too bummed.
The NBA also named their “5 under 35” winners for this year: Kirstin Allio, Dinaw Mengestu, Asali Solomon, Anya Ulinich, and Charles Yu. For the books these writers won for, there was a decent range of presses/houses represented, from Coffee House to Riverhead to FSG (who made out swimmingly this year).
November 13, 2007
It's no myth
Peter Jay Shippy's How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic is out now with Rose Metal Press.
Bill Knott says "Peter Shippy's verse novel begins as all novels should, with a cow crashing through the ceiling of its first-person narrator. Other delights ensue. Pound said 'Mauberley' was his condensed version of a Henry James novel: How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic operates under similar depth pressures and aspirations. The triadic stepline pioneered for US poets by W.C. Williams is here employed with vigor and narrative impetus; the rhythms are propulsive and captivating. This is above all an enjoyable book, fantastic and funny throughout. It can be read straight through, and I mean that as high praise. Shippy's 'polyglot reality' where "history is hence" held me bound for 80 pages."
Shippy's book is a modern retelling of/shadow text to the Oedipus myth. Classical allusions show up all the time in contemporary poetry, and it seems like at least 90 percent of the time, they're stodgy, safe, and uninspired. Shippy does a great job (though of course, Abby & I published it, so I'm biased in my opinion here). And of course Anne Carson handles classical references in a fresh and engaging way, and there must be others. Who else lately has displayed classical chops? And is there a point to having classical chops anymore these days anyway? What are the secrets to/benefits of using such allusions?
November 11, 2007
"The multi-faceted aspects of desire"
Now available: The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel - Second Floor, edited by Reb Livingston & Molly Arden, featuring
Eric Abbott * Deborah Ager * Malaika King Albrecht * William Allegrezza * Molly Arden * Cynthia Arrieu-King * Robyn Art * Sandra Beasley * Aaron Belz * Erin M. Bertram * Mary Biddinger * Ana Bozicevic-Bowling * Timothy Bradford * Joseph Bradshaw * Jason Bredle * Jenny Browne * Jenna Cardinale * Bruce Covey * Phil Crippen * Susan Denning * Michelle Detorie * Laurel K. Dodge * Mark DuCharme * Peg Duthie * kari edwards * AnnMarie Eldon * Jill Alexander Essbaum * Julie R. Enszer * Noah Falck * Michael Farrell * Katie Fesuk * Adam Fieled * Alice Fogel * Elisa Gabbert * Eric Gelsinger * Scott Glassman * David B. Goldstein * Dean Gorman * Anne Gorrick * Lea Graham * Kate Greenstreet * Piotr Gwiazda * Shafer Hall * Josh Hanson * Nathan Hoks * Donald Illich * Salwa C. Jabado * Charles Jensen * Jim Kober * Ron Klassnik * Jennifer L. Knox * Dorothee Lang * Sueyeun Juliette Lee * David Lehman * Reb Livingston * Rebecca Loudon * Justin Marks * Clay Matthews * Kristi Maxwell * Gary L. McDowell * Erika Meitner * Didi Menendez * Michael Meyerhofer * Steve Mueske * Gina Myers * Cheryl Pallant * Shann Palmer * Alison Pelegrin * Simon Perchik * Derek Pollard * Andrea Potos * Cati Porter * Laurie Price * Jessy Randall * Kim Roberts * Anthony Robinson * Carly Sachs * John Sakkis * Allyson Salazar * Christine Scanlon * Margot Schilpp * Morgan Lucas Schuldt * Patty Seyburn * Peter Jay Shippy * Evie Shockley * Alex Smith * Hugh Steinberg * Nicole Steinberg * Alison Stine * Mathias Svalina * Erik Sweet * Eileen R. Tabios * Bronwen Tate * Molly Tenenbaum * Chris Tonelli * Letitia Trent * Jen Tynes * Michael Quattrone * Ashley VanDoorn * Fritz Ward * J. Marcus Weekley * Betsy Wheeler * Theodore Worozbyt * Kim Young
Buy it! Keep it by your bedside!
November 9, 2007
It's hard out here for a pimp...
Go RIGHT NOW to Joe Massey's LiveJoural and listen to Justin Marks' cane poem, Sam Starkweather's 32 poem, and the rest of the called-in poems by a variety of rad poets. I love these things. Really stresses to me the importance of recording contemporary work. Not to mention how important it is, as you read through a collection of poetry, to READ THE POEMS ALOUD ...it is what they're at least partially meant for, no?
November 7, 2007
Keep your eye on the red queen...
Literary theory and psychology have a hot new hybrid: Impostor Studies. It seems perfectly natural to me that feelings of academic fraud should be formalized, as a great many of the people I know in academia seem to suffer from it. It’s the mental equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome for the knowledge worker. Or perhaps antibodies against overweening cognitive arrogance, the kind of prompted Larry Summers--when he was merely the chief economist of the World Bank and not the President of Harvard--to say, “I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.” (This was his explanation of why the U.S. should export toxic wastes to Third World countries.) On the other end of the spectrum, you have Buster Keaton flirting with this impulse when he claimed he really didn’t feel qualified to comment on his own work. In one sense, post-modernism is Imposter Theory writ large. If one entertains primal doubts about the legitimacy of one’s own speakerhood, then it is a natural (and arguably ethical act) to export it to all speakers, if for nothing else than to keep everyone honest. Mind you, this might be a fundamentally more compelling argument if power did not accrue to the one performing the destabilizing critique.
November 4, 2007
Two boys for every girl
There’s a lot of conversation going on in response to an article on gender and poetry in the new Chicago Review called “Numbers Trouble” by Stephanie Young and Juliana Spahr. Some of the locus points of this discussion are the Poetry Foundation’s blog (here, here and here), Simon DeDeo’s Rhubarb Is Susan (Simon points out that the numbers for race and class are much, much worse), and K. Lorraine Graham’s Spooks By Me.
Spahr and Young take issue with an article by Jennifer Ashton called “Our Bodies, Our Poems,” which asserts that all-women anthologies and similar feminist countermeasures are no longer necessary because gender parity has been achieved in poetry publishing. Spahr and Young decided to “do the math,” and looked at the numbers for a number of anthologies, presses and other poetry venues and found this not to be the case – men were still outnumbering women, often by two to one or more.
The bloggers at the Poetry Foundation make the argument that women do not submit as much as men, and therefore editors are not to blame for the imbalance. Mairead Byrne, in the comments field, puts forth that blaming women rather than the power structures is a poor and outdated excuse.
While I do think this is often the case – that men submit more aggressively and therefore editors are choosing from an uneven pool to begin with – I do know of journals that receive, in fact, more submission from women than from men (and these are not women-only journals). Two journals that report this are Coconut and No Tell Motel. If it’s not the case that all journals receive more submissions from men, why is it usually the case? Why are some journals, like the New Yorker and the Chicago Review itself, still publishing twice as many men as women?
November 1, 2007
Eccentric Genius Island
Get November off to an entertaining start by checking out this conversation between Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers, a trio Time, who ran the piece, says would be called “Eccentric Genius Island" if they had their own reality TV show. They talk about crazy dogs, Cormac bumping into Richard Gere in New Orleans, and why the Coen brothers could never adapt James Dickey’s To the White Sea. It’s a fun read and made me wonder if McCarthy maybe really isn’t that reclusive after all......
What would your Eccentric Genius Island look like?
